


Assorted Pacific Rim WIPs

by bellepeppertronix



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-31
Updated: 2015-04-10
Packaged: 2018-03-09 19:32:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3261746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellepeppertronix/pseuds/bellepeppertronix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So, as you know, I am  a dreadfully, agonizingly slow writer. Life has been weird for me for these last two years, and I haven't been updating with any kind of schedule in recent time. So, to make up for it, I'm giving you a bunch of WIPs! Most are untitled, and quite a few are later chapters of longer works. (Spoilers, I guess?) I will probably remove these from the WIP bin as I finish them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Newt and Hermann - the first times

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for your patience. I'm sorry I can't give you the completed works at this time, but I hope these little tidbits tide you over until I can finish!

Newt Geiszler always liked touching things he wasn't supposed to.  
This was,for the most part, why he found Hermann Gottlieb so fascinating.  
(In the beginning, at least.)

And the honest-to-god truth was that Newt isn't _purposely_ annoying--he just had a condition and on his bad days (when he was more hyperactive than attention-deficit) he _had_ to move around, _had_ to pace circles around his specimens muttering notes into his recorder, _had_ to read articles on his e-reader with one hand and type ideas on his computer with the other.

It's also why he thought the other man was so damn frustrating. He was like a rare (and very vicious, very touchy) specimen whose habits Newt had yet to fully study; he was never rightfully sure what the other man would do.  
So he was surprised (pleasantly) to find he got this far without Hermann slapping him in the face or cursing him out and leaving.

~

The other man's back was a ridge of bone, vertebrae climbing from between his shoulderblades, the fine knobs of the back of his neck. His spine a valley of dark between the ridges of his back.

(Newt thought ridiculous, inappropriate thoughts about sphinx cats, vampires and albino snakes. Things that were beautiful because they were strange, because they were dangerous.)

"Like this," Hermann was saying, as he finished rolling over. "It's...easier on my leg."  
And the way he said it--as if he were apologizing--made Newt feel a frisson of guilt. (Memories from someone else's childhood welled in his mind, but he was used to having to field a dozen conflicting thoughts at the same time, and he brushed them away without letting them get to him. Don't chase the RABIT; wasn't that what they told pilots?)  
He thought of dozens of corny porno flick lines he could say--anything to deflect the situation back into humorous fun territory where at least he was on good footing.

He ended up with, "That's cool. This is a really good angle for you."  
Instead of laughing, the other man only sighed.

"No angle is good for me," Hermann muttered, and then he buried the lower half of his face in one of the incredibly luxe pillows in the next moment. Newt had a fine view of back of other man's head.  
"Like you know. Have you _SEEN_ your ass?"

Which was like flipping a switch. Hermann was struggling upright, fighting to pull his bad leg from where it was trapped beneath one of the big pillows. 

Newt knew he'd fucked it up when he reached for him and Hermann slapped his hand away, his face like a thundercloud.  
"Awww, come on! what's wrong?"  
"This was a terrible idea, " Hermann muttered, and Newt felt his stomach bottom right the fuck out.  
"What? But--why? We didn't even get to _DO_ anything!"

"I didn't come here to be insulted," he said, and Newt felt everything good--the buzz, the good food, his stiffy--all deflate at once.  
"But I'm not--" he tried, then, "but I wasn't!"

"It was ridiculous to assume that just because we managed to establish a mental connection through the Drift, that we would be able to achieve a...physical one, outside of it." 

He'd never seen Hermann move so fast--yanking on his shirt and buttoning it with quick savage efficiency. His back was to Newt, his head bowed, and Newt knew that if he let him leave, he'd never have this chance again.  
 _They_ would never have this chance again.  
So he did what he did best. He touched what he shouldn't have. 

He scooted closer to Hermann, trying to be calm, trying to think like he was in the field approaching a very rare and very volatile animal. 

"Okay...maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part...but if you're gonna go, can I ask you one question?" he spoke slowly.  
Hermann's sharp shoulders rose and dropped.  
"What, Newton? What smarmy, debasing question could you possibly be waiting to bait me with?"  
Newt swallowed that, and it was his turn to bow his head. 

"Why'd you just assume, right off the bat, that I was making fun of you?"  
And when Hermann looked over his shoulder at him, his face was flat but his eyes were full of a deep, fathomless sadness.  
Finally he spoke, his voice low and tense. 

"We both know I'm nothing to look at. I just couldn't imagine--prior to _now_ \--that you could stoop so low as to make a jibe out of it. At a time like this!"  
Newt felt the kind of sad confusion you felt as a kid, he thought, when you learned that the other kids thought your Favorite Thing Ever was nerdy and therefore stupid. 

"Spare me the patronizing mock surprise. --I've seen the way people look at you. You've never for a day in your life had to worry about that, have you? No, no! Not the famed philandering Dr. Geiszler! You--you roll up your sleeves, waggle your eyebrows, and people _fling_ themselves at you!"  
Which, yeah, now that he was saying it like that, was...pretty true.

He'd had an awful time in high school, but college he remembered as a series of parties, conventions, and nights spent in other people's beds. The week after graduation alone he got so much 'Thank You (for writing that essay for me/helping me with research/finger-fucking me at two thirty in the morning to take my mind off how miserable the midterms were making me)' head it was unbelievable. 

Even back at the (other) Shatterdome(s), where there'd been a spare moment there had been a willing--and eager--scientist or engineer or mechanic, even a pair of pilots, once--when there had been pilots to spare. He was competitive (at work), of course, but never saw sex as that kind of accomplishment. More like a party, he felt--the more often and with more interesting people, the merrier. 

So--listening to a brilliant fellow scientist (and _ONLY PERSON_ brave enough to dive headlong with him into the brainspace of a fucking _KAIJU_ , for fuck's sake, making him by far the most interesting person he'd ever been naked with) berate himself made no sense until--  
Hermann had continued talking, his voice edgy and staccato. 

"And just _LOOK_ at you. One of the 'cool' scientists, one of the 'edgy' ones, with your tattoos and devil-may-care attitude. Who _WOULDN'T_ want--" But he caught himself, almost gagging on the force of his own words.  
He looked back at Newt guiltily, furtively.  
Which only served to cement Newt's hypothesis. 

Except this time, it didn't feel good to be right. Newt didn't think about his regret; he just knew that something was wrong with the picture when Hermann Gottlieb, PhD, former child prodigy who blasted his way into college at the age of _THIRTEEN_ and had his first PhD at twenty-one, was jealous of _HIM_. 

Him, Newt Geiszler, who smoked a lot of pot and would get into serious arguments with friends over the hypothetical outcomes of battles between Superman, Goku, and the Hulk.  
"Hey--but--it's not like I--" Newt tried to think of something to say, and faltered, feeling like an ass.

He sucked in a breath an unleashed his other ADHD-given talent: Very Earnest Word Vomit. He hoped it would work.

"Listen, I don't think you understand--I mean, I'm a pretty huge weirdo and YEAH okay you're right I flirt with a lot of people and I've, uh, been around the block NOT THAT I'M BRAGGING, JESUS, PLEASE, HERMANN, WAIT--I'm just--you just said, so. I'm admitting, yeah, and I was thoughtless, I was--I'm terminally self-unaware, okay, it's a problem. But...you're...okay, I didn't understand you, and then I saw you--in the Drift--and I...PLEASE WAIT, JESUS, LET ME EXPLAIN--I wasn't--I wasn't trying to snoop, I just--I saw YOU, the YOU you actually are, not, like, the YOU that everyone else sees, and who no one understands and everyone's vaguely afraid of--and I realized I was really wrong--really, really wrong--and I thought you were just a number-cruncher-guy, some kind of one-off savant AND I WAS WRONG, oh, my god, I was wrong. And I felt...I felt the way you felt about...me. Please--I'm not with you right now because I want to stroke my own ego or have you stroke it or whatever--" Newt avoided a really obvious, really choice pun, in favor of continuing on seriously, his mouth dry, his head swimming.

He glanced at Hermann, saw his face neutral, and barreled on, "Because, okay, I have to tell you, the first time I met you--I mean REALLY, not, like, at one of those bullshit science-department talks where they sit you down in alphabetically-arranged rows and expect you to make nice with everyone else there, even though they sit you next to a bioacoustics expert and she's talking about how interesting it is that orca pods speak different dialects, and you're nodding because yeah, that's really fascinating (and also super old news), but then you say something offhanded and horrifying about your--MY, sorry, weird habit--

“MY THEORY that underwater kaiju vocalisations interrupt whales' ability to use echolocation and cause them to get lost and beach themselves, probably to stop the sheer agony of their eardrums being shredded by the kaiju chatter, and the conversation dies a fast, bloody death, and she turns around to talk to the robotics engineer on her other side, and you--I, SORRY, I--turn around, and there YOU are, and the person you're sitting next to is some stuffed shirt from engineering who's trying to talk down you YOU about the jaegers, not even knowing who the fuck you are or that you wrote the programming, and you just. You looked so bored. And I wanted to know who the hell you were, looking bored while one of the _jaeger engineers_ \--the god-tier scientists, in the program--talked to you. It didn't look like you didn't GET it; it looked like you didn't CARE. 

“It was...in a room full of people all trying to politely sniff each other's asses, you were the only dog who sat down and turned your nose up. Not that I think you're at all canine-like in any way, except maybe loyalty? But really. You...you waited until he was in the middle of trying to say some shit before you just cut him right the fuck off, stood up, and just fucking LEFT. And I...okay, I was REALLY jonesing to get after you, find out who you were." Newt paused for breath, and looked down at his hands. There was dirt worked up under his stubby right thumbnail; his other nails were bitten down too low to pick it out.

He heaved a breath, but he wasn't done with his confession.  
When he felt brave enough to look back up, he saw that Hermann was still there, sitting with his legs off the edge of the bed, but he was looking at Newton, his eyes narrowed.  
"That was the first time," Newt continued.  
"The first time for what?" Hermann asked. His voice was interestingly flat, like he was probing Newt out. Drawing more from him.

Very few people could sit through one of his rants and A) follow him, as well as B) retain enough of it to question him. Privately, he hoped he wouldn't lose Hermann, but he knew if he sat down to actually explain slowly, he'd probably have to get up and start pacing. He couldn't afford to do that. Hermann was right _THERE_ , and he was also about a million miles away at the same time, and he couldn't afford to put any physical distance between them.  
He dove back in.

"That was the first time I looked at you and thought you were hard-fucking-core."

The stories about how confessing your feelings to your One True Love made you feel free were lies, Newt realized. He felt like his guts were full of writhing tentacles, and he was slowly vomiting them up, but the fewer he had inside, the harder they flailed.

"You...thought I was..." Hermann said, slowly, his face unreadable.  
"Yeah." Newt murmured.

Hermann was silent, and turned his head to, presumably, stare at the bare concrete wall beside the bed.  
After a moment, he murmured, "And...what was the second time?"  
Newt huffed a sigh, smiling despite himself. 

"You frickin' choked some asshole with your cane when he tried to downplay your work, once. It was back when we actually had a real K-Science department, and we were all sitting in at this meeting. You remember? The ones where the press didn't come in anymore, because evidently it was all getting too depressing? I was sitting in the back, and he was up there talking about how your work wasn't helpful--he said some shit about how you were wasting resources running numbers on when the kaiju would appear, when you could do better by helping them calculate how many Legos they'd need for their stupid wall, yadda yadda, and you and a bunch of other speakers were sitting in a row of chairs behind him. 

“He--I don't remember what he said, but you--all I saw was the crook of your cane come up around his neck, and then you just kind of, I guess, yanked him backwards so hard he just fell on his ass, and before he could spew any more bullshit, you got up and snatched the mic, and started explaining all the structural flaws with the walls, in, uh, really mathematically graphic detail. And everyone got reeeeally quiet, except--okay, now you'll probably hate me a little--a little more than you already do, I mean--and I kind of--I MAY have laughed."  
And now Hermann was looking at his knees, a small, almost wistful smile on his face.  
"You were there for that," he said, his voice low.

"Well DUH. After that, I uh. I kind of made it a point to follow you. --Your work, I mean. I...you were like, Crouching Grandpa, Hidden Badass. And you're right, you're right, I was fucking my way around the Shatterdomes, but I never even managed to work up the nerve to talk to you. Everyone I asked about you said you just didn't do the whole smart-people-fuck-a-thon thing, so...I just assumed the worst."  
"Which was?"

"That you were married to some ridiculously hot piece of ass who was keeping you all to themselves. And I was jealous, but I kind of got over it. Then it occurred to me that I _NEVER_ saw you with a ring on, or with anybody. So after the marriage idea died, I thought maybe you were ace, which, okay, I still would've tried--JUST TO HANG OUT, god, I'm not one of those 'LET ME CHANGE YOU WITH MY SEX' asshats--except you were _IMPOSSIBLE_ to find after-hours. It was like you were some kind of weird day-vampire."  
Hermann's smile was full-blown, now. 

"After all of this, why didn't you try to...to strike something up with me, the moment we were introduced as partner-scientists, after the K-science department had all but been dissolved?" his voice was still quiet, still cautious.  
Newt edged a tiny bit closer to him. 

"It--well, okay, it was--by then, the party was seriously over. Everyone was gone, no more covert sex in Dr. Whoever's office, because they were all either gone or dead. And when we lost the other Shatterdomes, I thought...I was so sure those wall bastards had finally snatched you, and then the Marshall got ahold of me and told me we were making a last stand here. Then I came here, and you _WERE_ the rest of the science department, and Jesus fuck, I couldn't make a good first impression, because have you _LOOKED_ at me? And I met you and immediately after, I thought, Holy shit, he thinks I'm a fucking _MORON_. And--then you were so _STIFF_. So since I figured there was no way for me to, you know, _DO anything_ with my raging sexual frustration, I might as well rile you a little."

Hermann was chuckling quietly, when Newt looked back at him.  
"You have all the relationship finesse of a ten-year-old on the playground."

"Yeah, well. You're...you wear...puffy...jackets. Yeah. Okay. Maybe I'm tired of trying to annoy you. And, okay, but really? I actually _WAS_ one of those kids who liked any kind of attention--positive, negative, whatever. You didn't seem to _LIKE_ anyone, so I--"  
"What was the third event, Newton?" Hermann said, so quietly Newt chewed the his own last few words up and swallowed them back down.  
"What?"

"What was the third event that made you think I was..." Hermann hesitated, his eyes still sad, his mouth almost smiling, "'Hard-fucking-core'. What was the third event?"

Newt paused a moment, blinking. Finally, nervously, he said, "When you--when you came in and found me. And then...when, even after you saw me like that--which was, oh god, pretty fuckin' awful--you...agreed to go and do the same thing with me."  
"I never knew," Hermann murmured. 

"That I thought you were the hottest shit _EVER_?" Newt blurted a laugh. "Oh my _GOD_ , yeah. For, like, _YEARS_ , yeah."  
"Newton," Hermann said.

His voice was...Newt didn't know. His voice wasn't sweet; it was sad, and calm, and hopeful, and Newt felt his heart do a really unfortunate one-two-CLENCH inside his chest as the taller man leaned slowly towards him.

One of Hermann's long, slender hands came up and skated over the side of his face--ball of his thumb fitting against Newt's earlobe, then sliding beneath and behind it--the long fingertips slipping slowly into the short hairs at the nape of his neck.  
Newt took an uneven breath.

Hermann kissed him, quiet, and everything was so quiet he could hear the rasp of fabric on fabric, the soft slide of his legs against one another as he uncrossed them.

There weren't fireworks or an orchestral score or any bullshit, just the delicious wet slide of Hermann's lips against his own, Hermann's hands oddly chaste in the way he was stroking the back of his neck, carding through his hair, and the perfect simplicity was enough that Newt made a little whimper high in his throat.

Hermann was the one who pulled away first.  
His nose was brushing Newt's, his eyes closed. 

Newt knew he was being kind of creepy, but he kept his eyes wide open, and he was staring at the other man--at the way Hermann's eyelashes were completely straight, a dark fringe against his cheeks.  
When Hermann looked back up at him, Newt willed himself not to say anything stupid.

Which translated to him not saying anything _AT ALL_ ; he looked at Hermann with wide eyes, his mouth slightly open, panting, thinking somewhere in his mind that Hermann smelled like a library--secretive, he meant--which was doing very good, very strange things for his shyly-returning woody.  
Newt swallowed, and reined himself back in.

"Do you want to try this again?" Hermann whispered, his voice low, sharp and almost gravelly.  
Newt nodded so fast his glasses slid down his nose and almost off his face.  
"B-But I mean--" Newt blurted, fixing his glasses, "We don't HAVE to f--to have sex. If you don't want to."

At that, Hermann smiled, and leaned back in, brushing kisses as light as breaths across the bridge of Newt's cheek, back towards his ear.

"I must say, it's rather gratifying to--what was it?--have one's ego stroked. Rather as pleasurable as having one's genitals fondled," he whispered, his lips so close they brushed Newt's ear when he moved them.

Newt was an ungodly combination of hard and dripping in his pants, and only registered dimly, in the back of his mind, that the word 'genitals' shouldn't have made his boner 25% harder, by his own estimation, but holy shit, Hermann's hands were in his HAIR again, fingertips moving down his neck, and holy SHIT, they were really DOING this, oh my god, contain your fanboygasm, Newt--

 

"At first, I found you insufferable. But...then I talked to people who talked to you. Everyone always mentioned your...intensity, all that. Not ONE person had anything negative to say. But it wasn't until recently that I came to see WHY. I...I learned that you are, in fact, the genuine article. Newton, " he turned to face him, his face plaintive, "you are the bravest, most brash, most loyal, STUPIDEST, most perfectly contradictory man I have ever met. and I am sorry it took me until the literal end of the world to realize this...but I...I am...very glad to have met you."  
Newt's eyes were burning and his throat was clotted closed. he thumbed at his eyes and tried not to overdo it--failed--and gave up.  
"...Thanks, man. I love you, too."


	2. Living Conditions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Newt and Hermann and living together. Domesticity and fluff! Or: that fic where i pick at the idea of (the lack of) lingering drift connections.

The thing they didn't tell you was that drift connections did NOT linger.  
They left big holes where all the new information--all the secondary memories and sensations--had only been for a screaming instant.  
They didn't tell you that you'd WISH the connection remained, that you would forever be mentally hunting ghost-afterimages, your eyes darting after hazy memories that would not clear themselves because you had never experienced them in the first place.

Newt Geiszler was learning this. He was learning this in several slow, painful degrees each day, and even though his life was great--his declarations, "I'm a real-life rock star, baby!" now being met each time with Hermann's wry smirks, instead of annoyed sighs--but nothing was ever enough, ever, and he spent roughly ninety percent of every day up to his elbows in kaiju viscera, with his brain playing and replaying every scenario he and Hermann had ever been in together. There was no sense of urgency behind his work, now, only a kind of casually-excited leisure. He wondered if his newfound sense of mellowness was his own, or if some of Hermann had rubbed off on him.

(He knows this isn't the case. If the Pons system had left pilots with such issues, each and every one of them would have been codependent, jealous wrecks unable to deal with anyone besides their copilot. Or else they'd swap personalities so completely that their minds would be scrambled, after only one or two jumps.) This still does nothing to assuage his driving need to be near Hermann--to at least be in spaces he has been in, to touch his belongings and catch his scent on the air. Newt wonders how much of this is just plain-old garden-variety love, and how much is drift-caused.  
He arrives at the conclusion that it doesn't matter.

He _has_ the man, he tells himself. He _has_ him. Hell, he's literally been on a walk-skip-jump through the other man's head! He shouldn't still feel like...  
This, he told himself, sliding around Hermann's bedroom door and creeping into his room like a singularly guilty thief. 

He stood a moment in the doorway, his eyes half-lidded, huffing the other man's smell. (Chalk. Chalk and toner, like old classrooms where there were still blackboards and laser-jet printers.)

Hermann's room was the neater of their own, obviously--big antique four-poster bed with acorns and oak leaves carved into the headboard, and a gray and white plaid coverlet, the top edge turned back exactly one foot to expose the paler gray lining. 

The walls were lined with built-in bookshelves stuffed full--he liked Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novels, Shakespeare's works, sonnets by other authors (Newt had been surprised he liked _any_ kind of poetry, and when he ribbed him about it, Hermann had waved it off. "Good poetry is what happens when one--very gently--introduces algorithms to grammar, dear boy." And he'd read him something with a rhythm that had made the hairs on the back of Newt's arms stand up in weird excitement.) 

Those books vied for space with books about aeronautics, the history of aircraft, and several dozen lovingly-made airplane models. 

(He'd offered to help Hermann hang them from the ceiling, only to recieve a horrified look that Hermann didn't have time to smooth away. He didn't understand _why_ until one day he'd slipped in without knocking and found Hermann absently rolling a small steel biplane back and forth on his desk, his eyes on his chalkboard. On another day, it was the big yellow canvas-and-wood one, and he was stretched out in his chair, his feet on the little stool he kept under his desk, the plane held over his head with one hand. Hermann didn't want him to put them where he couldn't reach them, because he _played_ with them. The thought was enough that it made Newt's chest feel too tight. A smile spread over his face.)

But the man had covered the back wall--the only wall not covered with built-in bookshelves--with black chalkboard paint, and sometimes Newt would push the door open a crack and watch him shuffling back and forth, nub of chalk in one hand, writing numbers down with soft clicks. The wall with the blackboard was across from the bed, and Newt knew Hermann liked to wake up some mornings and stare at the equations, with things clicking fresh in his mind.

(Newt had no idea what any of the numbers meant. Once, when he was shirtless and Hermann's sweat was drying off his skin and they were stretched out together on Hermann's massive feather pillow of a mattress, he'd asked what an equation surrounded by a carefully-drawn frame was. Hermann had looked over at him and said, slyly, "That's how I calculated which train to catch to be home in time to watch you watch Adventure Time."  
"All _that_?" Newt had said. "But it comes on every night at eight!"

"Yes, well, the latter half accounts for the probability that you will want or instigate sex, according to whichever episode you may have watched and how much marijuana you may have consumed."  
Newt had just stared.  
"Does it work?" he'd asked, dry-mouthed.  
Hermann had kissed his shoulder, his ear, his cheek.  
"Every time.")

He wasn't there now, though, and Newt blinked himself back from the tangent his mind had just yanked him down, to stare around at the room. 

(He was so, so glad the Drift connections were not permanent. If they were, his own unique cocktail of attention-deficit disorder and caffeine habit would have completely destroyed all of Hermann's rather legendary concentration and calculation skills. Foisting his mental weirdness on someone who _needed_ to have a one-track mind--possibly depriving him of his own mental state--was a terrifying thought. He'd been an ass for long enough, to enough people--he figured it was about time he tried to act decently towards one.)  
He shuffled his feet in the pile of the carpet underfoot, took a deep breath, and then tiptoed back out.

~~~(Across the Hall, on another day)~~~

This was ridiculous, he told himself, and he knew it.  
But his skin itched for it. He'd gone from patiently grading papers, to playing with a rather interesting set of equations he'd found, to playing with his favorite airplane, with nothing properly occupying him. Presently he was sitting at his desk,jogging his left leg up and down, and was seriously considering beginning writing lines--"I will not go snooping into Newton's room"--in binary, _anything_ , really, to drive back the burning sense of want.

He had a very, very good and very concrete grasp of what the Pons system, and the drift, could and could not do. It could not give people long-term mental or emotional links; the toll would be massive, and dangerous.   
So he told himself it was nothing.  
It didn't work.

He had two lines written in neat, thin lines and circles, before he threw his pen down and snatched his cane and levered himself upright.   
By this point he was hunting for a distraction--anything--and it occurs to him that he could do chores until he could put the thoughts out of his head.  
He nodded, feeling satisfied, and goes out into the living room.

Which is immaculate. All their furniture is well-loved and comfortable--a brown tweed couch they both found at a thrift shop; two pumpkin-orange armchairs they got from friends of Newt's once they'd moved in. The rug is a housewarming gift from his sister Karla, a once-fine Persian wool one with geometric designs of interlocked ochre-colored triangles on a red ground. Its right edge is frayed slightly. Their coffee table is something Newt made from scrap pipes, screws, and an old paneled door he'd found, and at first Hermann had scoffed, but eventually it grew on him. They'd varnished it very nicely, so it wasn't even obviously an old door unless someone asked.

There is nothing to clean. Even the entertainment center--overfilled with DVDs, video games, Japanese comic books, and more novels--is spotless, not a speck of dust to be seen anywhere.

He knows Newton did it for him, and the thought of the shorter doctor rushing around, cleaning and probably still shouting notes and theories into his recorder simultaneously--sends a bloom of warmth through Hermann's body.

He's insisted he can help around the house; for goodness' sake, he'd insisted, he had a joint condition, which sometimes gave him trouble; it wasn't as though his kneecaps constantly spouted blood or would burst into flames if he so much as moved around. Contrary to EVERYONE'S belief, he rather likes walking, and very much appreciates that he is able to do so.

Their little kitchen--done in red and white checks and stripes like an American diner from the 1950s (and finished before their desire for actual planned interior decor was subsumed by their desire to seek out which horizontal surfaces were most comfortable and convenient to have sex on) is also spotless, not a dish in the sink or coffe-rimed mug on the drying-board. 

He sighs, and sinks down onto the barstool they keep beside the sink, tapping his cane against his good foot.  
He shouldn't--he should NOT--feel this way. 

All he can think is that he has not felt this way for a long time--and certainly not this purely since he was five, knowing full well he was not to go into his father's study, but wanting, wanting so badly to read the books on the high shelves there.

He remembers every spanking he got, until his parents realized that while he continued to sneak into the study to pull the books down, he was doing it not to scribble in them or rip out the pages, but to READ them.   
There is no such trouble to be feared from Newton--not so much as a harsh word anymore, he knows.

He wishes Newton was there with him, there in the kitchen, so he could make them tea--which Newton would invariably wrinkle his nose at, but then slurp down eagerly the second Hermann added the cream. They could talk. They could develop some hypothesis about why this was happening to him.

Newton is strangely good at talking, at talking people down from things, or into things, or away from things. Hermann muses that it's strange only because, to look at him--without knowing him--one would mistake Newton for some inarticulate hipster. Yet when he speaks, with organized thought, he is one of the most eloquent men Hermann has ever heard. 

The energy he approaches everything with--as well as his constant (and seemingly incongruous) laid-back attitude--put people at ease in such a way that his intelligence came across as interesting and even 'cool', rather than intimidating. He has seen Newt explain complex biological theories to rugby players built like concrete slabs; has seen those same concrete slabs' faces lift into genuine understanding as Newt speaks, and seen them laugh when he punctuates whatever he's talking about with jokes and anecdotes.

Newton would have been able to explain that it was some secondary bio-response or somesuch that was driving him, even now, out of the kitchen and back down the little hallway, to--  
Hermann pauses, his hand above the doorknob.  
Newton is giving a guest lecture and is not due back for another few hours, he knows.

He has plenty of time.   
Plenty.  
That is his problem.

He knows this, even as he twists the knob and carefully--very, very carefully--a ludicrous degree of care, really--eases the door open.  
The reason is only apparent once he is inside the room, and has eased the door closed behind him just as carefully.

Newt is what he thinks of as a pragmatic mess-maker. Hermann has realized this after living with him long enough to watch him accumulate clutter, knowing he categorizes the piles according to age, importance, and type.

This does not alter or change the fact that the floor of Newton's room is barely visible for all the stacks of papers, books, folios and boxes.   
He looks away from the paperwork, up at the walls.

They both have bookshelves built into their walls, but Newt's are filled with 1970s pulp science-fiction novels and more manga and figurines--tiny, fully-articulated jaegers, arranged in a neat line side-by-side with EVA units, Gundams, and megadeuces, alongside row upon row of monster figures. Hermann has long since stopped trying to count how many Godzilla toys and xenomorph figurines Newton owns, alone; they seem to reproduce on their own, or appear out of thin air.

Newton's bed has a plain brushed-metal frame, and is covered by a plain, faded black duvet whose gray stitching is popping loose. His laptop--his personal one--is half-stuffed under his single, lonely pillow. 

Newt has tattered kaiju posters pinned all over the wall over his desk, surrounding the monument of honor: a framed print of Godzilla fighting King Kong. His re-varnished secondhand dresser looks like a monster with a lot of tongues, all thrust forward and spewing half-chewed food--garments Newt stuffed inside rather than folded and put away. Immediately in front of the dresser there is an avalanche of clothing, ranging from pants that, when held up, more closely resemble tights than bluejeans, an array of band shirts, and a few very badly-mistreated white Oxford shirts.

He smiles, looking over all this, knowing and glad that it is all so uniquely Newton's.  
He does not know why it makes him feel so much better, just to be around Newton's things, even if Newton himself is not there with him.

He carefully picks his way over to the bed and sits down on the edge. He does not fold a single garment or re-arrange a single stack of paper. He simply sits, content, and looks around at Newton's things.  
That is where Newt finds him when he comes home--smiling, both of them looking a bit sheepish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay okay yes, Hermann shits all over poetry in the movie. My headcanon is slightly to the left, haha~


	3. The Pentecost-Hansens

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> herc and stacker buy a house in california, and they tell themselves everything will be great.  
> they ignore the calls herc keeps getting--international, from australia--or, well, mako and chuck ignore them, and intercept them when herc goes to answer the phone.  
> everything will be better, they tell themselves.  
> everything will be fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is another piece of the same story-arc that Pacifica Construction takes place in. It's a prequel, sort of, a thing I wrote about the Pentecost-Hansens settling in after moving to a new country. I hope you enjoy it!

"That's it. That's the last box." Stacker said.  
He clapped (largely imaginary) dust from his hands and stood back, sighing with satisfaction.  
Herc stepped up beside him, smiling--or, well, trying to--and Stacker slipped an arm around his waist, drew him closer.

They stood together amidst stacks and rows and ranks of boxes, looking around at the room that would become the living room. Stacker kept wanting to refer to it as a parlor; Chuck kept telling him--with more affection than real sarcasm--that Yanks had no idea what a parlor was, and to do so would doom their visitors to endless confusion.

The room was large, sand-brown stone tiles under their feet running around to eggshell-white plaster walls. Overhead, the two wrought-iron chandeliers were still draped with cheesecloth covers, which had not deterred the settling of a minute, fine layer of brown-orange dust. Through the window they had a fine view of the back yard, where, to the west, there was a hand of pine trees rustling faintly with the breeze, their shadows barring the yard in the afternoon sun.

Stacker inhaled the new-house-smell--odor of old plaster, still air, and the peaking briskness of a California autumn, and looked back at Herc.  
Who was staring out at the landscape--vanishingly unfamiliar to him, though not as foreign-looking to him as it was to Stacker, he was certain. But Herc's face wasn't thoughtful, so much as blank-eyed and sad.

Stacker felt his mood dip from satisfaction to concern. He slipped his hand from around Herc's waist, moved his hand up the other man's back in a slow, soothing sweep.  
Herc blinked and seemed to come back; he looked up at Stacker and tried to smile again.  
"Nice view, isn't it."

"It looks even nicer from the master bedroom window. Remember?" He tipped his forehead against Herc's, and murmured, "What d'you say about assembling our bed first?"

"And leave me'n'Mako to do all the grunt-work? Not happening, old man," Chuck muttered.   
He shouldered around them, carrying a ratty, worn cardboard box marked 'comics', and balancing a roll of tape and a box cutter on top of it.

Herc pulled away slightly--Stacker sighed, but his annoyance was only mild.  
Without looking back at them, Chuck walked around the corner, down the hallway that led to their new staircase. He shouted over his shoulder as he went, "You should unpack the cutlery and plates first! I'm starved!"  
His demands for dinner were lost to the echoes in the house.

Stacker laughed aloud; Herc managed a wan, tired smile. But he more sagged against Stacker's side than leaned into it.  
Stacker didn't like that.  
He figured he'd have to do something about it.

~

It was only a week before the calls started back up again.  
This time, Mako found Herc's cellphone in the kitchen drawer in the corner, buried under a stack of magazine subscription forms.

She knew that Chuck had probably put it there, stealing it from Herc's night-stand while no one was looking. Herc was too preoccupied to notice, and since Stacker's only response to the theft and hiding was raised eyebrows and sidelong looks, they both took it as his tacit approval.

Mako sighed, swiping her finger over the slide-lock, already knowing who it was and dreading the coming conversation.  
"Good afternoon, Mrs. Hansen. Herc isn't in right now." 

She didn't hate the older woman; not precisely. But it was hard to feel anything but seething annoyance about a relative who acted like one of your fathers was making a strange "lifestyle choice"--one that was a huge mistake that needed to be undone.   
"Oh! Hello, dear! I...I suppose he and your--your, er, father are out...?"  
"Yes," Mako said, keeping her voice neutral. 

"It's a bit late, isn't it? But I suppose they're at a pub somewhere, getting a drink, meeting some of those famous California girls..."  
Mako sighed again and rolled her eyes.   
"Maybe," Mako said, trying not to sound too dry and sarcastic.

It must have worked, because Mrs. Hansen continued, "That's how he met Angie, you know. And wasn't SHE an angel! He and Scott were on leave, and went to get drinks. Scottie told me." Her voice was soft, syrupy-warm. It reminded Mako of cough medicine.  
"That's...nice," Mako continued. There was nothing else to say.

Privately, she wished Stacker hadn't raised her QUITE so well. Chuck would have been curt and simply said goodbye and hung up by now, she knew.  
Meanwhile, she was hunting for something she could say to politely put their pointless conversation out of its misery...

"Angie used to love the beach. She was a lifeguard, you know, when Herc met her. Such a lovely woman..." Mrs. Hansen trailed off.  
What was the point of this? Mako asked herself. Maybe if she hadn't answered the phone, Mrs. Hansen would have gotten the message and stopped calling.   
That wasn't likely. She called every week, sometimes twice.

"I just want you to know, I'm actually very glad your father is friends with my Hercules! I just...hope that the next girl he meets can hold a candle to Angie. Not many could, you know."  
Mako felt a hot, tar-sticky bubble of rage rise in her chest.

Before she knew it, she was clenching her teeth, her other hand a fist clutching the pen so tight that it bent slightly in her grip.   
"I think," she muttered, "He's fine."

"Oh, no. No, no. I think Hercules really ought to have stayed here, maybe taken a bit of time off, stayed with us. We've loads of friends with eligible daughters just dying to meet him. But you don't know my Hercules the way I do; I'm sure he's still mourning Angie. That must be why he's acting so strangely. You really couldn't even begin to understand, dear."

Mako's hand was starting to ache. She forced herself to put the pen down, splaying her fingers wide on the cold countertop. 

"My first parents were crushed to death when our house collapsed during an earthquake." She said, the words coming hot and fast, like molten metal. "Please don't tell me I don't know about loss."

The old woman's silence was so thick, more weighten than a gasp, and Mako felt an ugly happiness begin to replace the feeling of rage. She continued, "I think Herc is happy here. And I think that him being with my father is what's making him feel that way."  
Mrs. Hansen tried, "Oh, of course, dear! That's what friends are for, isn't it--"

"I was actually busy when you called," Mako continued, smoothly steamrolling over the rest of the older woman's sentence, "So, if you don't mind, I'll just mention to Herc that you called. Maybe you can call back tomorrow."  
"Well--but--"  
"Have a good afternoon!" Mako said, aiming for cheery and probably falling on creepy instead. 

She hung up the phone and slid it back into the drawer.  
And then slammed the drawer shut viciously.  
For a moment she simply stood still, her shoulders drawn up almost to her ears and her hands clenched into fists. Internally, she was still seething with rage; she wanted to scream and hack something into pieces.   
She wanted to see something break.  
A noise behind her made her spin around in place.

Chuck was standing there, eating an apple. He didn't look any happier than she felt; as a case in point, he looked actively annoyed, his face crunched up as if the apple tasted bad.

"My gran?" he asked.  
Mako nodded.

Chuck nodded back, his nostrils flaring barely. He already looked like a bull about to gore a matador, and the expression did nothing to soften that.  
"You're being too nice. Next time she calls, just do like I do--say he's not in, tell her to call back later, and hang up."  
"I feel rude."

"Trust me, she doesn't notice. She's stuck in this delusional fantasyland where, if she believes something hard enough, she thinks she can make it true. She'll still keep thinking of you as 'that nice Asian girl'."

Mako made a concentrated effort to relax--drawing in a huge breath and letting it out slowly--then another--then a third.  
It wasn't working.  
She looked back at Chuck.   
"Do you want to go for a run?"

~

"Still feel rather odd about leavin' the kids behind," Herc said, looking sheepish, as he slid into the restaurant booth.

Stacker made a gentle scoffing noise. "They're teenagers. Leaving teenagers to their own devices is the American way," he said, with a good deal more sarcastic cheer than he felt.  
Herc gave him a rueful, sad little expression that looked like the shadow of a smile.   
"And are we gonna have to do everything like Americans, now?" Herc asked.

"That is correct, Mr. Pentecost. Like Americans. We shall have to learn to measure everything according to a rubric that makes no sense and cannot be accurately converted over; to leave letters out of words and call it the correct spelling...we've already mastered driving on the opposite side of the road, haven't we?" Stacker listed. "Well, for the most part. But I won't tell about that slip-up if you won't."  
That got a laugh out of Herc--a real one, if a small one.

The waitress came and took down their order for drinks, and Stacker had enough time to mentally take stock of the situation.

Date nights were a good idea, he was telling himself. Herc didn't need to be cooped up in the house--the very nice, very large, but very empty house--staring at the walls and flinching whenever his phone rang.

Well. He was doing less and less of that now that Herc seemed unable to find his phone so often. He would call it and they would all hear it ringing from somewhere in the house, but it couldn't be fount. Mako was the one who quietly suggested that maybe they'd accidentally dropped it into a box.

Herc had looked panicked as he ran his eyes over the absolute mountains of boxes stacked in the living room, and all plans to relocate the phone had been abandoned. 

~

"You're doing it again," Stacker said, after a moment.  
Herc blinked and straightened up, looking around. He was honestly confused.  
"...What's that?"

"Looking at me. Only looking," Stacker said.   
"Oh. Er. Sorry?" 

Stacker chuckled again, his hand falling beside Herc's on the table. He skimmed his fingertips over the Herc's knuckles, smiling.

"You can do better. Try something along the lines of, 'Well, Mr. Hansen, you ARE devastatingly handsome, and that is a particularly flattering shade of blue...'" Stacker said, leaning forward a little.

Herc laughed again, but the sound was short, and a moment later his eyes were sliding from Stacker's face to land on his empty plate.

~

Herc woke up to the pounding sense of urgency he hadn't felt since retiring from the RAAF.  
Stacker's side of the bed was empty, the butter-colored sheets and caramel-brown duvet folded back and smoothed flat.

Hercules Hansen was not a man who spent much time reflecting on his emotions. Not until very, very recently, at least, when he'd been unable to do much else. 

So it took him a minute, lying in bed and staring at the early-morning shadows on the wall, before he managed to parse out that no, there was nothing that needed to be done immediately--no morning training run, no drills, no paper to fetch before the dog chewed it to all hell--nothing.

But the sense of pressure and foreboding sat like a weight in the center of his chest anyway, making his breath come short.

He sat up, groaning softly, wondering if he was old enough to feel so thoroughly tired. He scrubbed his face with the palms of his hands, itchy two-day-old stubble rasping over his palms. He had a fleeting pleasant memory of he and Stacker digging through six boxes while hunting for razors, and coming up empty-handed. 

Stacker had finally thrown in the towel with a shrug. "Well. Bit early, but I suppose we'll just have to be involuntary participants in Movember."  
"You already have a moustache, Stack," Herc had pointed out.

And Stacker had tugged him a little closer, butting foreheads with him gently, his eyes shining the way they did when he was about to make a terrible pun or groan-worthy joke, and he'd murmured, "Don't I? Well, then. I suppose I shall have to grow a beard..."  
And he'd given Herc a bristling kiss on one of his ears.  
Herc had laughed. 

Now, he just...sat. Hunched over, elbows on his thighs, bleary-eyed in the morning sun coming through the uncurtained window.

He still sometimes heard the phantom ringing of his lost phone--legendary battery life of Nokias be damned. He knew who it was.

Stacker's phone stayed quiet, aside from the occasional--and very often--call from his sister. He was the one who made calls, who was orchestrating their entire new lives here in this bizarre country.  
Herc wondered how he could stand it, the deafening silence where his own family could not stop clamoring for him to just stop the charade and come home. 

He'd never met Stacker's parents, and the only reason Stacker had met his was his urgent plan to rescue Chuck from his grandparents. And if his own parents were anything to go by, Stacker's family most likely was no better, no more supportive.  
He wondered what kinds of awful things they'd said to HIM.

His own family had done a hell of a number, needling him with questions about whether or not Stacker was blackmailing him, if it was about drugs, if he'd had some kind of breakdown, and didn't he think he should talk to a doctor about all this?   
He snorted softly to himself.

Stacker had been quite frank. His parents considered him to be wasting his talent and throwing away an ideal career. No explanations from Stacker could explain why he didn't want that life anymore.   
Maybe they had said other things, Herc thought. His own parents certainly had.

But he didn't want to pry, and he remembered the way Stacker would sit beside him, stiff as a wooden mannequin but unmoving, whenever he'd answered calls from his own parents.  
He felt like a lazy ass, completely hapless about everything. He didn't know how to get Chuck to like him, he didn't know how to ask Stacker to open up about his own family, wouldn't even know what to do or say if he did. 

He didn't know if he was meant to feel grateful or relieved or what, but mostly he felt--pressure, a constant sense that he should be DOING SOMETHING. Only, he had no idea what.

He settled on unpacking.


	4. Toddlers and Thunderstorms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The world didn't end.  
> The world didn't end, because Hermann and Newt were partly responsible for saving it, and afterwards they moved into a house in the (newly-reconstructed) city of San Francisco.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies beforehand about the weird tense-changes. I hope this isn't too jarring! And, as always, if/when I finish this, I might take it down. Happy reading!

Their new house was big and old--one of the painted Victorians that had miraculously been spared by Trespasser's huge clodhoppers of feet, Newt had joked--and together, they ripped out the cement paving the back yard, because Hermann was a proper Englishman and wanted a proper English garden. 

(Well. NEWT ripped out the cement, because Hermann was a proper Englishman who wanted a proper English garden, but also had fragile knees. And Newt was a proper husband who never told his huband No when he expressed a material wish.)

~

"They don't have NAMES?" Newt asked, incredulous, and the woman sighed and pushed her stringy, thin blonde hair behind her ears.

"Look. We have so many children coming in--infants, mostly--that we started just numbering 'em a long time ago. It's not because we don't care or anything like that; YOU try keeping proper track of a hundred and sixty screaming babies. If you want, we assign names to number batches. This one," she jerked her thumb at a crib near her, with a sidelong glance, "Is a 1-12, because he came in on the twelfth of January. That'd make him an A name, Adam or Aaron."  
"Holy fuck," Newt said.

The woman's mouth flattened into an angry line. "You got a better idea?"  
One of the other nurses called her away, and a moment later, she was angrily rising, yanking wrinkles out of her scrubs. Without even excusing herself, she strode away, leaving them in the room full of cribs.

The little black camera mounted in the uppermost corner whined softly as it began making its sweep. On the tabletop of the ugly beige hospital-table-trolley nearest the door, the big monitor made low, muted beeping noises.

"This is the most depressing place I have ever set foot in," Newton whispered. Speaking any louder seemed somehow profane; they were talking over the heads of forgotten infants. No one, he knew, could say how long their sleep would be serene--or if anyone would come to rescue them. Or what would happen to them when they were no longer cooing, dewy-eyed babies.

They knew they were only in a position to adopt one child. Twenty-five baby boys slept in twenty-five little cribs that looked exactly like plastic storage bins, covered with ratty much-washed hospital flannel sheets cut into blankets, and wearing ugly little knit and crochet caps obviously donated by charity-minded crafting circles. 

He looked over at Hermann and saw the other man standing there, one hand on his face, covering his eyes. He was crying, silent, his shoulders shaking, the hand on his cane white-knuckled.  
"Hey," He whispered, "Hey, Hermann...hey..."

Newt's hands were quiet as he moved them over Hermann's sides, up and down his back, between his shoulders. He wrapped his arms around his taller husband carefully, tilting his head back to look up at Hermann.

"Lean on me a little. Come on, lean on me. It's okay. We don't have to...we can go..."  
"No, Newton, we CANNOT leave. This...this is intolerable. I'm certain it's not properly LEGAL. There must be something we can do. There MUST." Hermann's voice, already nasal, was pinched and choked.

Newt looked up at him, searching, and then said words that were like peeling off fresh scabs.  
"We can adopt one of them."

Hermann looked down at him watery-eyed, and managed a somewhat strangled laugh.  
Newt kissed his chin, then, when he leaned forward and offered them, his lips.  
There was a soft, sibilant noise somewhere in the rows of cribs. Both their heads turned at the same time, and they saw one pair of small arms waving in uncoordinated circles above a crib in the last row, nearest the window.

"Want to go look?" Newt whispered, and when Hermann nodded, Newt squeezes his hand and did not let go as they walked over.

The baby lying in the plastic crib was so small--his eyes huge and almost completely black. Wisps of brown hair stuck out around the edges of the crocheted cap he was wearing--the cap hideous, made of white yarn with weird puffy bits of pastel pink, yellow, green and blue worked into the yarn. 

His eyes were solemn, as only babies are--solemn with the intent to process everything they see. Newt was perfectly aware of all the developmental stages the human brain went through. He wondered what obscure pre-thoughts were working themselves back and forth in the little guy's head.

"Hey, little guy," he whispered.  
The little arms stilled, one balled-up mittened fist pushed against one of his cheeks.  
The baby pursed his lips.  
"He's not screaming," Hermann said, hopefully.  
"Yeah," Newt said.

~

"We are not naming him Cornelius," Newt said. "Might as well just give him a stamp on the first day of school with his name on it. Imagine the poor little guy trying to fit that name on those lines! 'Cornelius Geiszler-Gottlieb'. Come on, that's what, half the alphabet? No way, man."

"I refuse to name him anything overly modern or faddish. Can you REALLY tell me it'd be a favor to name him something like Tanner or Hunter? Or...eugh...Skyler? Can you imagine a thirty-seven-year-old-man with a name like that?" Hermann countered.

Newt only rolled his eyes. "Yeah, okay. But--when did I suggest any stupid mall-brat name? Did you not read my list?"

Hermann rolled his eyes but slipped on his glasses to stare down at the crumpled, damp paper. His face went from blank to scowling as he went farther and farther.  
"Bruce. BRUCE! Are these...Newton, are these the names of comic book heroes? ...Wallace. Hm. Steven...James...Xavier...Alexander...Anthony...Newton, REALLY!"

"He'll thank me when he can pick out a hero costume on Halloween and really BE the character!"  
"Newton, did those words just leave your mouth."  
"The lack of upward inflection in that sentence suggests it was a statement rather than a question, so I'll just decline to answer it."  
"Newton!"

They name him Isaac--partially because it strokes Newt's ego, and partially because it pleased Hermann to think they'd named him after another scientist. Maybe it would rub off, he thought.

~~~

Their lives were most definitely not all sunshine and bunnies.

Anything louder than, say, speaking-volume music terrified him.  
They learned this the hard way one day when Newton was fiddling with the television, trying to attach some new speakers they'd just gotten, and he forgot the volume he'd had it at when he plugged the speakers in.

The intro to the anime Attack on Titan went blaring through their house at volumes closer to movie theater than home theater, and Newton scrambled frantically for the remote to turn it down.

~

"I'm going to drop him," Hermann said, with perfect dread in his voice.  
Newt only laughed. "No you're not. Look! You've got him. You're both fine!"  
"I'd feel safer if--"

"Here, want me to support your arm?" And Newt leaned forward, carefully, his arms sliding up under Hermann's.

For a long moment, they both stared silently down at the sleeping baby in both their arms.  
"Want to hear a deep, dark secret?" Newt asked.  
Hermann looked up at him, surprised. "Hm? What?"  
"I wanted to be a pediatrician, before Trespasser wrecked San Francisco."  
"...Really?" Hermann asked, his eyebrows raised.

Newt looks up at him and manages to keep a straight face for two seconds before breaking into a grin. "No, not really. But kids are cute, right? Like...humans, 1.0!"  
Hermann laughed, then stopped, almost flinching, when he looked down at the baby.  
"Doesn't have any software installed yet, not really," Hermann said, sheepishly. He was trying not to look visibly tense.  
He failed.

"Relax, Hermann. We're on the bed, and I've got you both. Even if you sneeze and drop him the terrifying distance of two inches, my arms are literally right here."

~

"What if he...what if he develops attachment issues? What if he doesn't learn to speak properly? What if he doesn't reach his milestones? What if we..." Hermann trailed off, his mind forming more worries than his mouth could give voice to.

"We'll do the best we can. We saved the WORLD! We can try to save one more little guy. Can't we?" Newton asked, and his perfect sincere trust was enough that Hermann nodded, fighting back tears he did not understand the reasons for.

~

Isaac was two and terrified of noises louder than speaking volume. A dog barking near the front door would have him whimpering, trying to burrow into Newton or Hermann's side or stomach or chest.

"Everything's all right, sweet. Just a storm, it'll be over in no time," Hermann murmured.  
There was a blinding static-white flash of light.

The bundle between them redoubled its shivering; Hermann rubbed where he knew his son's back was, very small and bowed, each vertebra delicate as a bird's. He made soft noises, hummed the way he remembered his mother doing when his knees and legs were hurting him particularly badly.  
Newton very patiently waited for the roll of thunder that followed the lightning to rattle past.

Isaac was crying, tightening harder into a knot of fear. They could hear his little muffled sobs of terror, the sounds knifing hard into Hermann's chest. He rubbed his little boy's back, feeling awkward and gangly and utterly, spectacularly useless.

"Don't do that," Newt said.  
"Do what?"  
"Talk down to him." Newt sounded more tired than aggravated. In the dim half-light of dawn, Hermann could not see his face clearly, but did not need to in order to know the expression he'd have--half-annoyed, half-sleepy. 

"Newton, he is two years old. Am I supposed to explain what thunder and lightning ARE, as if he would understand?"

"He's right HERE," Newton huffed, then gathered Isaac into his arms, humming. After a long while of humming, he began rocking, his arms gathering the blankets nearer to himself, and settled back against their headboard, still rocking slightly.

"I know it's big and scary. It's a big scary world, but we're here. We'll make it less big and scary. We promise. Papa and Daddy promise, okay?"  
Hermann felt gangly and awkward and completely _SUPERFLUOUS_.

Another lightning-strike, followed immediately by the crash and rumble of thunder.  
Isaac was peppering his sobs with little strangled screams now, and Hermann could feel the hairs all over his arms and the back of his neck rising.  
"Newton," he said. "Newton, maybe we should--are you sure--"  
"No," Newton said, "I'm testing a hypothesis. Want to help?" 

He indicated the area where Hermann thought Isaac's back might be--such a small expanse of space--and Hermann settled one hand there.  
On the tails of the next thunder-toll, Newt started to sing.

He picked soft bluesy things, ran through a handful of milder old ballads and onto singing nursery rhymes in borrowed tunes. His voice--which squeaked and rasped and broke at awkward times when he talked--smoothed into a raveled-silk sound, husky and not quite deep.  
Hermann watched them, half-spellbound himself, as Isaac's crying loosened into whimpers.

The storm began to taper off, thunder muttering dully into the distance, and the lightning died off completely.  
Isaac shivered in Newt's lap, until Newt nuzzled at the top of the huddle of blankets and said, "Knock, knock. Daddy Newt, coming in!"

Gently, he tugged and pulled at the mess of sheets and comforter until a small, very tousled head of brown hair appeared, flying wildly all around a round, red face. Isaac's eyes were red and very puffy from crying. Snot tracked down from his nose and over his lips and chin, and he squeezed his eyes shut. He pressed his face to Newt's chest, his little fists coming up to ball themselves in tight handfuls in Newt's nightshirt.

"Awww. Ohhh, it's okay, little guy, it's okay...storms are big and scary, I know. But you were so brave! Look at you, all your fingers and toes are still here, right? Here, let's count 'em together..." Newt gave Hermann a significant glance, and then looked at the nightstand lamp on Hermann's side of the bed.  
Hermann complied without either of them having to say anything. Ruddy yellow light washed across the bed, throwing everything from pale, lambent gray into yellow-light.

"...two...free...four...five..." Isaac counted, his small, solemn voice overlaying Newt's, Newt's hands seeming huge next to his baby fingers. His tattooed arms looked technicolor and somehow absurd and perfect at the same time, wrapped loosely around their son. When they finished counting his fingers, Newt cheered a little and hugged him tighter.  
Hermann felt like his heart was swelling inside his chest.

"Hey there, Miracle Man. Why the lottery-winner grin?" Newt asked him, smirking. Hermann looked up and found his face amused and indulgent.

Isaac was hiccupping himself out between the two of them, and Hermann looked down at their little boy, completely uncertain what face he had been making.  
"I'm sure I don't know what you're referring to," he said.  
"You should. You're seriously smiling like you won, like, a really big prize."

Hermann sighed and shuffled around, before laying back in bed. He wanted the last thing he saw before he drifted back to sleep to be this--his husband and their son, both of them with bed-mussed hair, both looking at him wearily, affectionately. He was so perfectly happy, he wished there actually WAS a way to capture emotions permenently, to store them up for a rainy day.  
"Maybe I have," he whispered.

Isaac half-wriggled free of his cocoon of bedding and leaned over, wrapping his arms around Hermann's neck, and planted a damp, snotty kiss on Hermann's cheek. 

A moment later he was rubbing his face into the collar of Hermann's nightshirt, smearing him liberally with snot and half-dried tears, and Hermann wanted to laugh as much as he wanted to very gently extricate himself from the toddler's grasp and change the shirt.

Instead, he sat up very carefully, kissing Isaac on top of the head, smelling salt and tears and milk.  
Newt nuzzled his ear, his cheek. Hermann turned his head and kissed him back. 

~

"We ought to get him a violin," Hermann whispers, and Newt glares at him.  
"You aren't stuffing my baby boy into some stuck-up conservatory!" Newt hisses.

Isaac is doing something very distracting with the guitar he is currently playing with, repeating crescendoes of high, sharp notes.  
"An electric one," Hermann added, and Newt sighed and rolled his eyes.  
"All right. MAYBE."

~

He was five when he had a more or less compelete mastery of German AND English, and Newton and Hermann were giddy and nervous and eager to teach him anything he wanted to learn.

"You are NOT shipping him off to some godawful boarding school," Newt said, warningly, one night.

Hermann was unbuttoning his work shirt, and looked up at him, amused and annoyed. "Why would I EVER? I shall...merely take a sabbatical from teaching. You will, as well. We'll teach him."

"...that's not exactly what I meant, either, babe," Newt said.  
Hermann only laughed. "Why, Dr. Geiszler, whatever is the matter? Afraid of being alone with a kindergartener for more than a few hours a day?"

~

But it turned out to be the best choice either of them could have made.  
They alternated--Newt working while Hermann taught Isaac

Isaac liked learning new words in different languages, airplanes (though, honestly, their mechanisms and machinery fascinated him more than their ability for flight) and Pokemon.

By the time he is nine and is disassembling his mechanical toys to see how they work--very meticulously, at his desk, taking care to sort the pieces--Hermann is itching to have him take an IQ test. 

"Why does he need one?" Newt asked.  
"Because--he--he very well might be a genius! WE are geniuses, raising him, and so--"  
"And so imagine how disappointed he'd be if the number came back 'normal'. What he'd think we felt," Newt said, his hand on Hermann's arm.  
Hermann fell silent.  
"Let's say he's bright. Obviously he is," Newt said, and pulled him away from the door. "Why does the number matter? Look."

Newt nods back in the room's direction. "Look how happy he is. Look how much he loves...disassembling our old PS3. Hermann, why does Isaac have our old PS3? I thought we were saving that--"

"You said we ought to encourage him." Hermann says, smug pleasure warring with nervousness inside him.  
"Besides, he got the old DVD player working."  
"What?"  
"He read the manual--twice--and then decided he wanted to see what its innards looked like. Then he took it apart. I helped him dust some things, and then we put it back together again."  
Newt looked sincerely impressed, his eyebrows perching on his forehead.

~

"We can't just--expect him to FORGET about his birth mother! I mean, CHRIST, Hermann! What do you want to do, tell him a fucking stork dropped him off? Tell him we found him growing inside a cabbage in the back garden?"  
"WE CAN'T BLOODY WELL TELL HIM THEY FOUND HIM IN A CRATE IN AN ALLEYWAY, CAN WE?" Hermann exploded.  
Newton was completely silent, chastened.

"No," he murmured. "But we can't just...let his past die. What if...what if she's still alive, his mom? Jesus," Newt said, and shuddered. "Have you ever--when you were a kid, i mean--gotten accidentally separated from your parents, like in a supermarket? And you walk around feeling like you've been flayed alive, like you're going to die, like everyone is staring at you but no one wants you? Imagine...imagine that. Only...for both of them."

Hermann, next to him, looked ashen. They both looked out into the yard--at where Isaac was building a sand castle in his little sandbox, tamping sand down on the top with a red-and-yellow plastic spade. 

They watched him swipe his dark hair back off his forehead, watched him straighten the red and brown plaid jacket he was wearing before kneeling again in the sand. He had a pile of sticks arranged in rows on the sandbox's raised wooden edge, and now he was taking them and carefully pressing them into the sides of the sand edifice.  
"What if she wants him back," Hermann whispered, horrified.  
Newt swallowed, trying not to choke. "I don't know."

~

The woman cleared her throat softly, trying to remain professional, and said, "...he was found alone in the wreckage. The...there were thirty-seven bodies recovered from that particular shelter. He was the lone survivor. Actually--the reason he survived, I was told, was because he was...unable, at the time, to make any noise that might have attracted the kaiju. He...he had a case of pneumonia, at the time. The only notes attached to him came with the EMTs, saying he appeared to be about nine months old. Nurses here discovered that he also had ringworm all over his back and legs, and was slightly malnourished."

Hermann swallowed, his tongue thick and dry. "His mother must have been very poor."  
The woman nodded. "We do not have any paperwork at all on her, whoever she may have been. She...the woman the first responders believed to be the baby's mother was pronounced dead at the scene. She was crushed by bent steel beams. He was...in a cardboard box, wrapped in blankets, near where she was found."


End file.
